Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#161

Post by chris_wot » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 1:33 PM UTC

wklauss wrote: post #149

wmccullough wrote: post #140

Lot of people in this thread crapping on Microsoft. I don't know that Microsoft is more brave or more innovative than Apple yet, but I know one thing, they are more brave and innovative than Microsoft five years ago. That's all that matters. While I'm sure the grand plan is to eat Apple's lunch, they seem more focused on being better than themselves. I think they are onto something with the Surface line, they just ne…

> Steve Jobs was just much better at having many of those failures never see the light of day. Not even that. A lot of his failures saw the light of day, we have just forgotten about them. The same we will do with the current ones. This, BTW, applies to all companies. To reach this point the Surface line has gone through a lot of mediocre products and bad decisions, we just don't think about them anymore. And Windows…

Ah, if only that worked for OSS stuff like Gnome.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#162

Post by ocdtrekkie » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 1:34 PM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #147

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's entire talent pool for self-driving cars has left. They had basically the original CMU group from the DARPA challenges, but they've since gone.

Where/why did they go?

Sebastian Thrun went to Udacity, where he's started development on an open source self-driving car project (unlike Google's proprietary system), and Chris Urmson seems to have not announced any new projects at this point. I haven't followed details on some of the lesser known entities, but I wouldn't be shocked if they eventually gravitated towards Thrun's project.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#163

Post by zyx321 » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 1:37 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #115

toyg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> computers for the masses At those prices, more like computers for the 1% - a niche almost as small as illustrators.

Far more 'for the masses' than the Surface Studio which is three times the price, though. And, of course, at those prices, three times is a LOT. Everyone seems to be of the opinion that home desktops 'for the masses' are on the way out anyway, so those who will be buying iMacs (if they continue to exist) in future are likely to be in the 1%; the Surface Studio buyers will probably be in the 0.1%, though.

>three times the price

It's only 30% more than the iMac of comparable size (which is last year's model, to boot)

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#164

Post by notalaser » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 1:38 PM UTC

massysett wrote: post #152

notalaser wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part that I find increasingly unpleasant (and unsettling) is that, overall, the quality of the entire experience has been declining . Four years ago, suspend/resume was pretty much a solved problem on regular, run-of-the mill hardware. It worked out of the box, hardly needed any tuning, hardly had any performance problems. It was messy when it was introduced but by 2011 or so, we pretty much took it for granted.…

Yikes. I'm sad to see that stuff backsliding. Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely. I used i3 with Debian. That kept things simple enough so I could understand them. That meant no niceties like a display manager. Back then I could explain the differences between startx and xinit, and I could compile kernels. The desktops were way too complicated to fix if they broke. I tired of the w…

> Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely

I used to do that for a very long time, too, but it's getting unpleasant. A lot of things get upset if you don't have a "proper" session running behind the scenes. It requires me to learn more about xdg and systemd than I can learn without giving in to existential dread about my profession, and frankly, it's a shame to see decades of progress in the GUI go wasted on me just because the Linux community won't get its act together.

In some ways, I think I'm more or less like the proverbial dinosaur in this regard. Virtually no one developing for Linux cares about the desktop anymore. The Linux "community" is, increasingly, a bunch of huge hardware manufacturers, automotive consortiums and a few companies with large datacenters to run. This is where the money -- and most of the development effort -- is. Most of the people who were interested in, and could meaningfully contribute to usability-related efforts and desktops have long gone to web or Apple land.

Edit: in fact, I think virtually everyone I know has moved to macOS, OpenBSD or Windows. Can't blame them.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#165

Post by ixtli » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 1:38 PM UTC

notalaser wrote: post #128

jfoutz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardware is solid. I have zero complaints about build quality. You are not obligated to upgrade to the latest OS (but you probably should...). I feel really comfortable saying you can get 4 years out of a mbp. If you really need the out, just in case you need to install windows or linux, wait 2-3 months, just to make sure other people have done it reliably. There is always risk it's not the "optimal" choice, but…

Thanks! It's reassuring to hear this sort of things in the middle of the current zomg MPB bad rage.

Just read this thread and I'm also comfortable recommending the hardware for three or four years easily. Also, the top level comment describes a small amount of what I went through about 10 years ago that made me switch back to Apple, though I built a hackintosh instead of a laptop.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#166

Post by Volt » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 1:43 PM UTC

tkp wrote: post #89

lagadu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow Air owner I feel exactly the same way. I like new toys but looking around between the macbooks and macbooks pro there's nothing I'd want to replace it with. To apple's credit the Air performs incredibly well and the only reason I looked into replacing it was because its 128gb SSD is a becoming a problem, so I'm using that as an excuse to upgrade into something newer and shiny but the only things I see tha…

Not to invalidate your excuse, but if you need, you can probably upgrade your MBA's SSD. Installed an OWC Aura SSD in mine, it's is very straightforward.

I've personally had those OWC drives die on me four times now.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#167

Post by yedpodtrzitko » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 1:47 PM UTC

nicky0 wrote: post #74

lmm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> spies on you Any reason to believe MS does this more than Apple does? > their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level. MS making their own hardware looks to be at least partially a response to that. > - build quality machines that seemingly never wanes in performance while provide enduring support that make them last so much longer than their competitors that it shifts the arithme…

It wasn't always the case, but you are now allowed to run macOS in a VM on Apple hardware.

So you still need their HW, not that useful.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#168

Post by Hasknewbie » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 1:51 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #73

The central premise is that Apple isn't innovative anymore. Let's look at the technologies Apple has materially advanced over the last few years. * Custom screen technology leap-frogging 4K displays directly to 5K, at a full-system price below that of a 4K screen alone from competitors at the time. * wide colour gamut screen tech putting them several years ahead of the competition. * Brand new screen digitiser techno…

"3D Touch" is something thar was in the Nokia E6-00 in 2011. Force-feedback touchscreen is not new, and much like capacitive touch-screens I suspect it was R&D'ed by Synaptics and Apple happened to be their first mass-market customer.

Apple can use their formidable logistics (few variants bought in huge quantities for several years) to be first-to-market with these improvements. The same logic probably applies to their Hi-Def smartphone/laptop screens, I don't think they made fundamental R&D in that space, but signaled early to manufacturers they were ready to pay for them. This makes them appear as innovators, while allowing their competitors to offer cheaper alternatives a few months later (where they invariably outdo Apple spec-wise after a year or so, so clearly the tech is coming from the manufacturers, who were just waiting for their next-gen to become economically viable). That is no small feat, and has a positive impact for the industry, but I would not call that innovation.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#169

Post by jmanderley » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #130

curt15 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the 5k displays actually Apple's? It would be a strange move to exit the monitor business if they actually pioneered some new display technology.

None of the standard connector specs has the bandwidth to support a 5K signal at the same level of quality, so they can only do it in an all-in-one system until the public standard connector tech catches up.

This is only half true. Current external 5K displays require two DisplayPort cables.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#170

Post by illumin8 » Mon, Oct 31, 2016, 2:00 PM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #15

There's no real underdog now. Microsoft has a pretty consistent track record of looking at other companies making money, and making a microsoft version of that. Bing, xbox, azure, and zune are pretty obvious examples. Surface doesn't seem to fit that mold at all. They're giving every indication of doing something new. I can't think of a real underdog right now. Apple had this sort of desperation to do something good,…

I don't think big, radical, change the world tech ideas are going to come from the same type of technology startups they have come from in the past. It seems like the next generation of big ideas will come from infrastructure-heavy startups like Space X, Tesla/SolarCity, and Bezos' Blue Origin. There will probably be some potential Hyperloop opportunities as well.

All of these are huge, expensive undertakings. Making humanity distributed will be expensive and costly, but also transformative. Solving global environmental sustainability with solar power and energy storage, and revolutionizing planetary transport with hyperloop technology will also be hugely transformative. I don't see that happening without spending tons of money on infrastructure.